Developing good parent-coach relationships

Ensuring parents and coaches are connected can help players enjoy themselves and learn. Richard Shorter, founder of Non-Perfect Dad, explains more.

Photo from Increasing respectful behaviour from sporting parents, check out the video for a task to use at your club

Parents are the biggest influences on a players, especially around mindsets and the attitude with which they turn up to training.

Coaches, who work well with parents, can help parents understand their role. Having a good coach-parent relationship helps kids develop in better ways.

If you’re a parent-coach

Parents, especially at grassroots clubs are often coaches as well. So usually those parents will already have a level of connection related to other parents.

If you're a parent coach, you need to make it clear to your child when you're being a coach and when you're being a parent.

You need to make sure that your child isn't hearing coaching conversations at home or that they have inside knowledge on the team. That's just not fair on your child or on the other children.

Having a co-coach helps, it means sometimes you can have weeks off and watch your child from the sidelines as a parent. Your child also gets to experience you in different roles and not as the coach all the time.

Developing good relationships with parents

If you’re not a parent-coach, then approach parents the same way you build all relationships: quality, time, clear boundaries, a bit of fun and engagement.

Don't act like your broadband provider which sends you lots of messages about terms and conditions all the time. In the sports world that means don’t send lots of messages around ‘this is how we behave, this is not how we behave’.

That's important, However, the quality of relationships matters.

Here are some things you can try to improve coach-parent relationships:

• Try to talk to parents stood on the sideline (I understand this isn’t always easy because there’s alot going on)

• Encourage a dialogue between coaches and parents by hosting an evening to chat about the season or matches. Ensure there’s opportunities for discussion, co-creation of culture and questions.

If you encounter poor sideline behaviour

If you see poor sideline behaviour, you can distract parents by gently asking them how they’re finding the game.

My friend Nick Wilkinson (shout out to Coaching Care Creativity subscriber Nick!) gives parents lollipops if they're being too noisy. That's because he's got a really good relationship with parents. It works pretty well.

You can play games. One of my favourite to play is Jenga. Get two parents playing Jenga against each other in the clubhouse after a fixture. The have all the other parents and children shouting, cheering and clapping at them.

This is a chance to show what the different behaviours sound like and what the impact is.

Talk to the parent group. You can reinforce the need for good behaviour by getting the players to talk to the parent group before they play: Say thanks for coming. This is how we want your support.

Obviously, it's context specific but find creative and helpful ways to challenge coaches and help parents to have supportive conversations with their children.

Challenge conversation. It's the first question in my book: get parents to ask their children “what do you want from me on game day or training?”

Let the players set the agenda. Coaches can prompt parents to ask that question before a training session or 5 mins at the start of training or gameday.

After a tough game, connect with the parents and say ‘you know what it's like when you've had a tough day, let your children relax and just chill out in the car.’

You can also share stories. Perhaps at training, ask parents to share how they found a tough bit of work or sport,and how they rebound from it.

Prompts and sharing like this helps to set the agenda. It gives parents the opportunity co-create the environment with you and the players.

Through Non Perfect Dad, I’m running ‘the best season yet’ webinar series. It’s aimed at schools and aims to help parents understand their role, what it is and what it isn't.

Together, with the children's school, they've got a closer partnership which will help children thrive and develop.

Getting parents engaged and volunteering

Getting parents to engage can be difficult. Ask people to do specific jobs. Look at your parent body. See who is suitable to help out and ask them to do smaller jobs to start with.

Don't ask them to sign up to a lifelong commitment. Ask them to do something once a month. This could be asking them to count the number of completed passes at training or a match.

Give them give them small tasks to help them grow in confidence. Don't be afraid to hand on dull admin elements of it to parents. Giving parents small tasks makes them feel valued. It gives them the confidence.

Organise socials where the parents are included as well. Ask them what socials they would like, so that they’re included in the decisions.

Give parents a chance to provide feedback at the end of every season: How did you find the season? What did we do well? What are our core values? What was your child's highlight of the season?

That will give clubs a good understanding of how parents feel. It also gives you marketing material to help grow the club for next season.

As a coach it’s also important to role model. I know how busy the season is, but be really intentional and take time out for CPD.

That shows the parents that development as coaches and wanting to be better for the players is important to you.

It’s not necessarily linked to the parent engagement piece, but have a strong emphasis on upskilling coaches. Have a united culture across the club. Making continuous development and training mandatory for new coaches who sign up.

Promote a high culture of learning among the coaches. That means that coaches are being creative, fueled, inspired.

That will help them connect with parents in a better way or deal with difficult and difficult challenging parent conversations.

---